SOLA
A sunscreen brand that lives on today's sun.
SOLA is fictional. Its home isn't an ad or a feed: it's a live map of the Los Angeles coast, printed like a risograph poster, that shows the real UV at five beaches right now, when to cover up, and how long until fair skin burns. Its face is Sola, a stamped sun whose mood follows the actual sky. Its reels are made from the day's readings and point back to the map.
Brand · Art direction · Character · Data design · Interaction · Motion · Sound
Brand was what you said.
Influencers were who said it.
Next is where people go.
Make the brand a place.
The question
Feeds are full, and borrowed trust is wearing thin. What's left for a brand is to be somewhere worth checking: useful, alive, and different each time you come back.
The idea
A sunscreen brand whose home is today's sun. Open it before the beach and it tells you the truth: UV 3 at Santa Monica, cover up from 11 to 2, an hour and a bit before you'd burn. In June it says something very different.
The look
A risograph print: off-white paper, three inks that overlap into new colours, grain, and plates slightly out of register. It reads like a poster on a café wall, and it doesn't look like any other weather app.
A live map
Real UV, sun and sea for five beaches, printed in ink.
Sola
A stamped sun whose face follows the real sky.
Made from the day
Short films built from the readings, pointing home.
Drag the sun
The hill along the bottom is today's real UV, sunrise to sunset. Drag Sola along it to see any hour, and every reading on the page moves with it. Tap a beach to switch the whole page there.
Honest numbers
The UV index is shown as the whole number it's reported as. Protection starts at UV 3, as the WHO advises. Burn time is a rule of thumb for fair skin without sunscreen, and the sea temperature is labelled as a model estimate, because it is one.
Sola runs on
the real sun.
Instead of an influencer, the brand has its own face. Sola is printed like a rubber stamp, in the same inks as the map, and changes mood with the sky: asleep at night, yawning at sunrise, easy in the morning, squinting at moderate UV, fierce above 8, drowsy before sunset. The moods were drawn from one sun in the concept image, so they stay one character.
Every reel
points home.
Three vertical films, each built from that day's real numbers and ending on the live map. The numbers are variables, so tomorrow's report is one data pull and one render away. They're graphic-led, using type, ink and the character, with no stock footage and no faces.
One image,
then everything
matched it.
The piece started as a single concept frame, generated with fal to set the look: inks, layout, and the sun on its hill. The live page was then built to match it, but with real parts: the coastline traced from OpenStreetMap, the readings from Open-Meteo, and the type set in code so every number stays sharp and true.
Sola's six moods came from the sun in that frame, redrawn with fal and printed into the page with multiply blending so they overlap the inks like ink. The reels are HyperFrames compositions that share the same paper, inks and character, with a music bed and stamp sounds generated with stable-audio.
Live map
Five beaches, UV, sun path, sea, burn time, shade window, night, phone layout.
Character and reels
Six moods; three vertical reels with sound, built from real readings.
A daily reel
The sun report rendered each morning from that day's numbers.
SOLA Room
The map as a gallery installation: the room's light follows the live UV.
An ad asks for your attention. A place you check every morning earns it.
Project scope & production notes
What this covers
Concept and brand
Risograph art direction
Live data design
Character and six moods
Interaction and phone layout
Three reels with sound
How it was made
A personal concept. SOLA is a fictional brand and this is not sun-safety advice. UV, sunrise, sunset and sea temperature are live from Open-Meteo; the coastline is © OpenStreetMap contributors. The concept frame and Sola's moods were generated with fal (nano-banana 2.1), and the reel sound with stable-audio 2.5. The page and reels are built in code (canvas, SVG and HyperFrames), written alongside an AI coding assistant under my direction.
Concept, art direction, character, type, colour and motion direction: Isaac Hernandez. Code written by an AI coding agent (Claude Code) under his direction. Concept frame, character moods and sound generated with AI models under his direction.
YOAKE
A konbini that runs on Tokyo time.